Glo Networks Technical Blog (Glo Blog)

One of our customers recently wanted to upgrade their 6 terminal server which they have hosted in a data centre, they were 5 years old and it was starting to show, with 60+ users across the 6 servers the system was starting to get slow and the costs were high for the out of date hardware they were running on. The backup of the servers was not ideal, with each of the servers backing up to each other.

Project goals –

• Upgrade the servers to new hardware
• Save money
• Better way to backup
• Faster system

We purposed to the customer that we could make their current 6 physical server in to virtual servers and host them over two powerful physical servers on a much faster connection than they currently had, back all the servers up to separate location and save them money.

The customer accepted our proposal and we recently carried out the migration over a weekend, by Monday morning the servers were all up and running as virtual server on the two new servers. The new system will save them just more than £6000 a year.

Using disk2VHD (found here) we converted the physical servers, then transferred them to the new host and set them up on Hyper-V.

As well as having backup now done to a separate space away from the host servers it also adds an extra level of disaster recovery to their system. Should they have a hardware failure, being virtual servers we can have their system up and running very quickly (less than a day) on new hardware. All users had the exact same setup as before, the only difference they noticed was that their server was much quicker.

All of this also makes future migration, upgrades or add additional servers much easier thanks to virtual servers.

Posted by Dave in General, Hardware, Operating Systems, Servers | No Comments »

There is more and more talk now about Windows 7, Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-v R2.

Windows 7 server will be called Windows Server 2008 R2 and has a wealthy list of new features as well as the next version of Hyper-V.

first some of the new feaures in Hyper-V

Processor support has grown in Hyper-V R2, the next version will be able to support up to 32 logical processors on the host computer which is twice as many as currect 2008 Hyper-V

Hot add ans remove hardware, this will allow you to add and remove virtual hard drives and pass-through drives to a running virtual machine with the need to reboot – minimizing downtme, this requires it to run a scsi controller, you will not be able to hot add remove storage controllers. 

Live migration, this is mainly for the bigger networks but will enable you to move running virtual machines.

SLAT – Second level translation will leverage new processor features to improve performance and reduce load on Hyper-V, it will improve memory management performance and will decrease hyper-v memory usage from around 5% to 1% for the total physical memory.

Dynamic memory is another internesting new feature, you will be able to create a pool of memory that is dynamically distributed accross virutal machines, this can be controlled by setting initial ram and a minimum and maximum for each virtual machine, this should allow for greater consolidation by addressing one of the most limiting factors.

More features of 2008 R2 -

improved features of terminal services, direct access it will also include powershell 2.0

Posted by Dave in Operating Systems | 1 Comment »